


as the curtain falls

by mickleborger



Category: Wiedźmin | The Witcher (Video Game), Wiedźmin | The Witcher - All Media Types, Wiedźmin | The Witcher Series - Andrzej Sapkowski
Genre: Gen, POV First Person, terrible haunted places are people too
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-15
Updated: 2019-08-15
Packaged: 2020-09-01 06:45:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 641
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20253877
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mickleborger/pseuds/mickleborger
Summary: "One of them has become a queen."





	as the curtain falls

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kimaracretak](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kimaracretak/gifts).

> (Soen, "Orison")

_In the spring the valley will blossom anew_, I remember saying; and I do not remember now if it was Filavandrel's gaze on my back or the smoke in my throat that was heaviest. The fields of ash below smoldered still in circular red patterns like those of the crimson-ring on my hand, little moth starving with no place left for her children. The fields of ash below were black as her wings were white, and she was the last I saw that summer.

The valley is full of secret things that never cared for its human lords and were often a help to those youth who were conscripted, but no help came from them that year; and much like the butterfly, I have not seen them since the harvest. Beyond the sprawl of ruined garden I thought I might have seen a shadow of something with horns retreating, but when I looked again it was gone. I know that it was not smoke.

_ In the spring the valley will blossom anew_, I said to Filavandrel who knew very well that I was not speaking to him. The little legs of the butterfly were pins of ice on my hand; and when the frost came it was as pins of ice in the ash, pins of ice in the forest.

In the autumn when the frost bloomed and both Filavandrel and the butterflies had gone I stood at the window and listened for the sound of hooves. A furious whisper from the stone, hissed by phantoms unwelcome, spoke of the might of Nilfgaard and the relentlessness of the Vrihedd. No wraith may harm me in my home but their fingers still snatch, their teeth still clack. No ghost may enter the place of my work but those ones like moths to a light flutter around the echo of Filavandrel's warning, left hanging in the air even months after he has gone.

The window that looks out into the fields lets in too much cold, but is not the cold of the changing season. The treeline beyond the fields is still. I cannot look out toward it without the feeling of nothingness, not even the stare of a resentful watcher. I can only feel little legs long gone from my hand, and the push of something at my back.

(At Samhain I heard the clattering of bones and steel above the chatter of the sleepy forest and I locked the door to that room for good, and I put away the key, and I do not listen to the muttering behind it when I pass by.)

In the dead of winter I felt them spill out from under the door like a breaking dam, and as a valley below the dam the corridor around the room steadily darkened. The door remains locked but I walk past it and see the window at the end of the room, and the empty plains beyond, and the silent woods farther still, and the mountains from which come tumbling down only snow and the sense of betrayal.

In the lightless winter when the mansion cracked I hurried along the corridors alone, and the susurrating things from behind that door followed. The hall cannot be blocked without splitting the mansion in two. There is something of a joke there, and it is not a funny one.

Now as the days grow long and grey I hear the rotted cuirasses of the Hunt echo up into the sky somewhere under the sound of dry logs piled up in the pyre for Beltane. The ground is still cool under my knees, and the dirt silky between my fingers. I gaze out toward the treeline and I see the multicolored dots of a valley once again blooming and it does nothing to distract from how utterly empty the forest is.


End file.
